NEW FRESH paper "Beyond the heritability of life satisfaction ..."

This new German paper is another big punch to .... behavioural matching algorithms and genetic matchmaking!

Please remember personality = temperament + character
Personality is composed of two basic types of traits:
traits that an individual acquires, dimensions of character;
and
traits with biological underpinnings, dimensions of temperament (Cloninger 1987).

PAPER "Beyond the heritability of life satisfaction – The roles of personality and twin-specific influences""In a behavior genetic design, we investigated individual differences in life satisfaction and its relation to personality with respect to both internal and external influences. We questioned the absence of shared environment and examined the specific contribution of additive and non-additive genetic influences.We also tested for twin-specific environmental influences in a total sample of 1308 dyads including identical and fraternal twins, siblings, mother–child and grandparent–child pairs. The results showed substantial shared environmental influences on life satisfaction that varied between twins and non-twins, supporting twin-specific environmental influences. Additive and non-additive genetic influences on life satisfaction were completely shared with personality. The remaining variance could be explained by unique non-shared environmental influences for life satisfaction independent of personality."

"Studies examining sources of individual differences in life satisfaction can be categorized in two main research directions. One implicates environmental factors, such as life circumstances and life events, and another emphasizes personality traits and genetic influences as important for life satisfaction.On the one hand, life events (e.g., marriage, divorce, unemployment, birth of a child), life circumstances (e.g., cultural influences) and demographic factors (e.g., income, education) constitute external environmental factors.On the other hand, several studies have shown that life satisfaction is consistently related to personality, suggesting the existence of a so-called "happy personality"Although the specific correlations between personality traits and life satisfaction are moderate, the results of a meta-analysis by Steel, Schmidt, and Shultz (2008) showed that as much as 39% of the variance in quality of life measures can be explained by personality.

Like personality, life satisfaction showed substantial genetic influences (30–37%), both additive (14–17%) and non-additive (16–20%) in nature, supporting the idea of a genetically influenced baseline of satisfaction.... we cannot conclude that satisfied parents were more likely to have satisfied children because of their shared genes if substantial non-additive genetic influences are involved.

In our multivariate behavior genetic analyses, we found that all genetic influences on life satisfaction were also genetic influences on personality..... we could not investigate spousal similarity in our sample to estimate the effect of assortative mating (i.e., the tendency to select a spouse with similar genotypes and/or phenotypes). Assortative mating could inflate estimates of shared environment because it increases genetic resemblance for DZ twins and siblings, and to lesser extents for mother–child and grandmother–child pairs but not for MZ twins."